Advanced bootstrap and adjusted bandwidth for content distribution in peer-to-peer live streaming

Abstract

Today peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have been deployed for various Internet multimedia applications such as live video streaming service. However, both peer churn and upload capacity insufficiency are inherent problems causing long start-up delay and unstable playback quality. Therefore, we introduce a scalable application-layer multicast algorithm, ABCD-P2P, which inherits the short end-to-end delay and low control overhead due to the push delivery scheme. The logical overlay is close to the physical topology (i.e., geographic proximity) in ABCD-P2P, so a short streaming multicast delivery path reduces the number of hops and avoids the network bottleneck or far routing. Both an advanced bootstrap mechanism and an adjusted bandwidth mechanism are suitable for the asymmetric bandwidth network. The mathematical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme can achieve the goals of high playback smoothness, short start-up delay, short end-to-end delay, low control overhead, and short recovery time.